INTERNET MARKETING Archives - Page 12 of 13 - DBC Digital

Archive for INTERNET MARKETING – Page 12

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November 14, 2011

Creating a Keyword Strategy for Internet (Inbound) Marketing

The following is an excerpt from our eBook with HubSpot: “The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing” (See the end of this post on how to download the full version of our book.)

Creating an Effective Keyword Strategy

What are Keywords?

Keywords are words or phrases (phrases are known as “long-tail” keywords) that someone enters into the search box on search engines like Bing or Google or on social media sites like Twitter, Facebook and LinkedIn.

Why Build a Keyword Strategy?

As you know, most people now begin learning about and finding business through search engines. Business owners have been taking advantage of this phenomenon for the last decade or so.

In order to benefit from this use of keywords as a business owner, you need to be sure you have “optimized” your website to rank well with the keywords your prospects are likely using to find products and services like yours.

Use Keywords Tools

While it requires some research to determine what keywords your prospects and clients are likely using to find the products and services you offer, it is not difficult. Tools such as Google’s Keyword tool and Hubspot’s Keyword tool offer simple ways to narrow down what keywords would work best for you.

As a business professional, you should make sure the right people are finding your business online. In this post, you will learn how to define which keywords will maximize your potential to draw in relevant traffic from search engines.

Make it a Regular Activity

Researching your best keywords should be a regular activity. The positive results you achieve in terms of page rank and increased traffic to your site are undeniable. A well-researched keyword strategy will help you increase natural traffic to your site and reduce the money spent on pay-per-click advertising.

How to Create a Keyword Strategy

1. Create a list of 5-10 long-tail keywords that apply to your business.

Put yourself in the position of someone that may not be familiar with your business but is searching for help or information about your products or services. What words would they/you put in the search box to find that information? Those words are going to be your keywords.

2. Choose phrases based on their “relevance” and levels of “difficulty.”

Very general words such as “marketing” or “lawyer” or “real estate” are very competitive because they are very general. They will return millions of possible answers from Google or Bing and make lousy keywords for your business because they are very difficult (impossible) to rank high on the page for them. A much better approach is to identify those phrases related to your business niche, such as “Inbound Marketing Denver,” or “Highlands Ranch homes.”

You should find a balance between relevance and difficulty. Choose between five and ten keywords that match your business well.

3. Design and optimize your website around your keywords

Once you have identified what keyword phrases would work best for your company, use those phrases throughout your website as appropriate. The search engines will catalog those frequent phrases in their database and present the searcher with the best options for that phrase, which if you’ve done it right, will include your company near the top!

Download the full verison of our eBook: “The Essential Step-by-Step Guide to Internet Marketing.”

Have a question or an opinion? Share it with us below. Or call us at (303) 357-5757 or email us a dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING

Posted by DBC Digital on

November 2, 2011

What Other Arrows are in Your Quiver besides Inbound Marketing?

What About the Other Arrows in the Quiver, Mr. Hood?

As you know, dbc is a marketing company that supports all aspects of Denver-area businesses marketing efforts. We focus a lot of our time supporting Inbound Marketing strategies for our clients.

But, in these days of website banner ads, Google AdWords, Facebook Ads and Internet-based marketing options, we’ve noticed that some long-established, but “un-sexy” marketing methods may have been over-looked recently to the possible detriment of the savvy marketer.

Direct mail isn’t always thought of as a valuable contribution to a company’s digital marketing campaigns, but if used correctly, this method can not only be a viable advertising avenue, but also contribute to the business’s online advertising success.

Direct mail can add value that is often overlooked by business owners. There are some general rules about direct mail marketing that marketers need to keep in mind to keep their pieces from being thrown away, but if the guidelines are followed, these pieces can provide benefits that aren’t available to Internet-only marketers.

Best Practices

Direct mail marketing works best when it’s highly targeted and ties into a complete marketing campaign. Fortunately, those are two things direct-mail does very well. There are some great suggestions in the market for direct mail marketing, but the primary advantage is that direct mail allows its clients to tailor the pieces to specific demographics in local communities.

For instance, new advances in technology allow businesses to adjust their design and copy to match different target audiences in the same print run. Providing a clear “call to action” as well as pointing the recipients to the marketers’ website and social media accounts gives the recipient a clear direction in which to proceed. Businesses that utilize direct mail marketing are always collecting information on the parts of their campaigns that do best and are always adjusting their strategy to improve response rates.

Benefits

If used properly, direct mail marketing campaigns can last anywhere from several months to a year or more, keeping your former and potential customers informed and encouraging them to engage with the you.
Reconnecting with past customers allows a business to provide coupons or updates on additional services and profitable upsells. Contests and promotions can lead to recipients trying out your company’s services for the first time, giving your company the opportunity to generate new, loyal customers.
Additionally, a physical piece of mail can make an advertising message more tangible for the customer and can include a gift cards that can generate more brand loyalty.
Direct mail doesn’t get stuck in the “Spam” box. And, if you have targeted your list correctly, your recipients won’t consider your piece to be spam anyway!
Direct mail marketing campaigns can provide some great benefits to businesses if used properly. Providing a clear message, call to action and tying together all the company’s active marketing campaigns can engage your customers and keep you at top-of-mind.

The possibilities for direct mail marketing are nearly limitless and, when combined with its laser-precise targeting capabilities, can be used to entice new customers or retain current ones.

If you haven’t considered a direct mail campaign lately, now may be the time. Give us a call at (303) 357-5757.

Have we missed any other benefits to direct-mail marketing in this blog? Please add your thoughts!

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, SEO, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

Posted by DBC Digital on

October 25, 2011

Inbound Marketing Lead Gen: Come Out, Come Out, Wherever You Are!

Here are Six Tips to Use to Increase Your Leads

While there seems to be some good news hidden among the economic hurdles in the economy, generating quality leads in today’s market is still a challenge.

Here are six quick tips for Denver-based businesses to help you reach a broader market of your targeted prospects and increase your leads.

It’s a game of inches. The fact is there are no silver bullets in today’s lead generation. You need to do a lot of little things right. Once you find a lead, you need to keep nurturing them through follow-up emails and Calls-To-Actions until they become a client.
Fact: You will get tired of your message before your target market even hears it. Believe it or not, marketers get bored easily. The tendency is to want to change your message every week, and somehow make it more interesting. Resist the urge to keep yourself interested in your message and give your message time to work its way into the market. Stay on your core messages over and over again in everything you do.
Your prospects can’t buy if they don’t know who you are. Amazingly, this point is often overlooked. It doesn’t matter how good, fast or inexpensive your products/services are if your target has never heard of you. Focus on this simple truth and make sure you are working on getting “found.”
Pretend you are a Search Engine algorithm. No matter what your line of business, your market is looking for you on the Web. Everything you do to generate leads needs to be asked with: “Will this activity improve my search engine page rankings?” If not, reconsider spending money or time on it.
You must be fully engaged in Social Media. This is no longer an optional item for successful lead generation. A vibrant, robust social program centered on a focused strategy will pay for itself many times over.
Don’t require your prospects to make a big leap. Some products/services are harder to describe quickly. It may be easy to sell beer because everyone knows what it is. Saying “less filling” is not a hard concept for the client to grasp. On the other hand, trying to sell server virtualization is not so easy. While marketers may want to say “less filling” for everything, unless your market already knows what you are talking about, and how it can solve their problems, your pitch will fall on deaf ears.

Do you have other suggestions or ideas to share with the group?

Let us know and we’ll publish a follow-up with credits to you.

Feeling a little overwhelmed with too much to do and haven’t made a dent in your marketing strategy? We can help. Give us a call at (303) 357-5757.

Categories : BRANDING, INTERNET MARKETING, SEO

Posted by DBC Digital on

October 11, 2011

Inbound (Internet) Marketing: Improving Your Visitor Conversion Rate

High website “conversion” rates (transforming your website’s visitors into sales leads), can be one of the most challenging results to achieve as a marketer.

There are five steps you can take to increase the conversion rate on your website. The first step in your inbound marketing strategy is always to get your website found by your targeted customers (covered in my previous posts) and then providing those visitors with compelling reasons for them to take specific actions on your site.

But once you have a visitor reach your site, how do you get them to take the specific action you want them to take in order to convert them into a lead?

Before we go any further, it is important to define what we mean when we use the term “lead.”

In most cases, companies here in Denver define a lead as when we have the ability to connect with a prospect directly. For instance, a lead could be any of the following:

A visitor fills out a contact form on your website.
A visitor signs up for the newsletter.
A visitor calls the phone number listed on your website and talks to someone in your company or leaves a message.
A visitor becomes a fan on your Facebook page, or follows you on Twitter or LinkedIn, etc.
A visitor emails the address you provided on your site requesting more information.
A visitor downloads a whitepaper from your site and you collect their contact information.
A visitor attends a webcast that you offer and you capture their contact information.
A visitor starts a free trial of your service.
A visitor purchases a product from your site or calls to place an order.

All these interactions have one thing in common: the ability for you to connect with your web visitor after they have visited your site. All these methods are effective ways to capture a lead, but getting your visitors to take action isn’t always as simple as it sounds.

Research has shown that you have roughly 20 seconds to get a visitor to interact with your website before they move on. As a result, you must provide a compelling reason for your visitors to take an action (pick up the phone, fill out your form, or connect with you on social media) on your site or you will lose the ability to connect with them.

Your first step is to create “engaging” or “remarkable” content and make it compelling enough for your visitor to be willing to give you their contact information so that you can follow up with them. One of the best ways to do this is by providing compelling offers. Your offers can be anything from providing a copy of recent, helpful research (“white-papers”), putting your visitor on your distribution list for helpful and informative newsletters or blogs, or entering them in to a current contest you are running.

If you don’t yet have any compelling offers on your site, now is the time to start thinking of doing it. According to the research firm Marketing Sherpa, adding case studies or other valuable content offers can actually increase your website conversions by as much as 30%.

Here are some simple actions you can take to increase your website conversions as part of a seamless inbound marketing strategy:

1. Prominently Place Your Company’s Phone Number on all your Website Pages

One of the best ways to convert a website visitor to a lead is to make it easy for them to call you. Place your phone number in the upper right corner of your website in big and bold numbers, making it easy to find. Also make sure it is on every page of your website, so that no matter what page they are currently on, they can easily find your number and call you. You don’t want them searching for the “contact us” page just to find your phone number.

2. Provide an Engaging Take-away

Give your website visitors a taste of your product or service before they buy. You can do this by providing a free trial of your product or service, a white-paper on your industry, or a free demonstration of your product or service in action. Make sure you put a short contact information form in front of any offers you make to ensure you are able to follow up with your visitors later. For best results, keep the contact form short; in most cases you’ll just need their Name, Company Name, Phone and Email address.

3. Newsletter Sign-up

Create a short section on your website where visitors can sign-up to receive your monthly newsletter. After a visitor submits the form, have a page automatically provide them with a link to your archive of past newsletters. Also, be sure you have set up an email auto-responder to send them a quick “thank you” for signing up with you.

4. Product Reviews and Testimonials

Creating a section on your website of previous customer’s testimonials can really boost your visitor’s confidence in your company and encourage them to take the next step of learning more about your company. Studies show that testimonials on your website can increase conversion rates by up to 35%, by building confidence in your visitor’s mind about your product or service.

5. Engaging Content on Social Media

A great way to drive more leads to your site is to have your content become “viral.” The more people that see your website’s content, the more leads you are going to receive.

You should write every article or blog post on your site as if it is going to be read by thousands of people. At the end of every article make sure you have a Facebook link icon, linking to your Facebook business page, and if you are a business-to-business company, be sure you have a LinkedIn account page and add the LinkedIn icon as well.

You should also consider opening a Twitter account if you do not already have one. A Twitter account can enable you to spread your content faster and farther into the internet and to reach more of the people that are interested in your service or product.

Bottom Line:

Growing your conversion rate through effective Inbound Marketing takes fewer resources and can be done more effectively than traditional marketing (direct mail, radio and TV advertising).

Need help? Give us a call at (303) 357-5757

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING

Posted by DBC Digital on

October 5, 2011

Why is Inbound (Internet) Marketing Growing So Fast?

Why is Inbound (Internet) Marketing Growing So Fast?

While the Dow is bouncing around 12,000 again, the U.S. government continues to spend much more than it has, the economy is still striggling, and many traditional sales departments are hurting.

But, our blog today is about something more positive — the fact that, just as we saw over fourteen years ago when there was a burst in the Internet bubble, financial pressure is forcing companies to become more efficient. And just like then, these changes are forcing new, more effective uses of the Internet.

When the last downturn began, Denver businesses started shifting some of their marketing dollars to “search engine marketing” (SEM) because it was more measurable and targeted than traditional advertising, so it appealed to marketers with tightening budgets.

Inbound Marketing Saves Money

As the flat economy continues, businesses continue to look for ways to improve their efficiency. Denver companies have been moving expense dollars out of the more-expensive paid search (pay-per-click, banner ads, etc.) area and into areas like search engine optimization, content creation and social media platforms that help them get found in the “organic” (natural) search engine results.

These changes are driving a new era of marketing on the web – the era of “Inbound Marketing”.

Okay, so what is Inbound Marketing?

Inbound Marketing is about using marketing activities that are focused on helping you get found on the web by your customers when they need you, rather than interrupting their day when they don’t.

In traditional marketing, companies focus on using “interruptive” tactics to get the attention of their targets. They use approaches that are poorly targeted and that, by definition, must interrupt their prospects to be effective. They use cold-calls, magazine ads, T.V., and direct mail.

While many of these techniques are still useful, they are getting more and more expensive and the returns are weakening.

For instance, Caller ID now helps to block unwanted cold calls, DVRs make T.V. advertising less effective, spam filters now block mass emails and tools like RSS feeds (Really Simple Syndication) are making print and display advertising less effective.

It’s still possible to get a message out via these channels, but it costs more and the results are not as strong.

Denver Inbound Marketers are turning outbound marketing on its head.

Instead of interrupting prospects with television ads, Inbound Marketers create videos on YouTube and link them to their company’s web page. Instead of using display ads in magazines, they create their own blogs that their clients and prospects willingly subscribe to. Instead of just cold calling, they create useful content and tools on their website and find that prospects are calling them.

Instead of pushing their message into the marketplace over and over again with a hammer, they attract customers like a magnet.

The most successful Inbound Marketing campaigns have three important components:

1. Quality Content – Great content is the best foundation of a successful Inbound Marketing campaign. It is useful content that attracts potential customers to your site and your business.

2. Search Engine Optimization – Effective SEO makes it easier for potential customers to find your website and your great content. It is the way all effective marketers build their sites. They use “on-page” and “off-page” best practices to maximize their search engines rankings.

3. Social Media – Social media increases the reach of your quality content. When your great content is shared across networks of personal relationships, it becomes more “credible” and is more likely to attract those targeted prospects to your site.

Why Inbound Marketing Makes Sense

Since our economy has been stuck in “molasses mode “for a while now, more-and-more Denver-based companies have been turning to Inbound Marketing tactics because it they are a more efficient way of using marketing resources. As a result, their marketing ROI has been improving.

There are three specific ways Inbound Marketing can benefit traditional marketing:

(1) Less Expensive – Traditional marketing generally requires a bigger budget. Either because you are purchasing ads, email lists or renting space at trade shows. Instead, Inbound Marketing is all about generating quality content on your website and blog and sharing it. A blog costs nothing but your time to start. A Twitter Facebook and LinkedIn are free, too. Each can draw hundreds of customers to your site.

(2) Better Targeting – Traditional approaches such as cold-calls, direct mail and email are usually less effective because marketers don’t take the time to effectively segment their lists. You’re reaching out to a mass of individuals because of one or two attributes in a database instead of fine tuning your persona. When you engage in Inbound Marketing, you only talk to people who have “self-qualified” themselves. These people have shown an interest in your offering, so they are much more likely to be interested in your service or product.

(3) The Value of Inbound Marketing Grows Over Time – In order to maintain your ranking at the top of Google’s pay-per-click results, you need to maintain that expense each month. If instead, you invest that money in quality content creation that ranks naturally in Google’s organic results; you’ll be in those more effective results.

Inbound Marketing is Empowering

Now, as we continue to work in a challenging economy, online marketers are using the tools of this new read-write internet to become more efficient. They’re using social media, they’re publishing content and they’re optimizing it. They’re becoming Inbound Marketers.

With the tools that have become mainstream over the last two to three years, the scale of any business can be unlimited. If you have a great product and the skills to communicate with your customers, you can compete with the biggest advertising budgets.

That is exciting, and for Denver’s small and medium businesses it’s empowering.

Need help in deciding how to take advantage of Inbound Marketing? Give us a call at (303) 357-5757 or contact us here.

Greg Sherwood is CEO of DBC Digital, a marketing agency based in Denver, Colorado. With over 30 years of marketing experience with traditional and inbound (internet) marketing, Greg helps mid-sized businesses get a better return on their marketing dollars.

You can reach Greg at (303) 357-5757 or at dbc@dbcdigital.com

Categories : INTERNET MARKETING, PPC ADVERTISING, SOCIAL MEDIA MARKETING, STRATEGY, WEBSITE DEVELOPMENT

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